These days, many forms of communication can utilize emojis. Emojis are small digital images or icons that are used to express an idea or emotion. Examples of emojis include a “smiley face” image or a “thumbs up” image. The communications that can utilize emojis include, by way of example and not limitation, email communications, chat communications, communications through various applications such as a web browser, social media application, interactive shopping experiences, and the like. The use of emojis continues to grow in popularity every year.
While emojis continue to grow in popularity, the way in which these emojis are represented make them difficult to employ in scenarios that are designed to enhance a user's experience. For example, emojis are represented using special unicode encoding, e.g., “u'\U0001f4c'”. The unicode representations make the use of emojis particularly challenging with applications that employ natural language processing. This is because the unicode representation does not convey context, but only maps to a particular emoji. In addition, the context in which an emoji is used may lead to an ambiguous interpretation. For example, if a user uses a “smiley face”, the user may be conveying happiness or sarcasm depending on the context in which the emoji is used. Accordingly, approaches that use a flat dictionary lookup to map an emoji to a meaning may likely return an inaccurate definition. For example, a “smiley face” may be mapped to a short name such as “beaming face with smiling eyes” such that it is constrained to this definition. Yet, if the user intended sarcasm in a message in which the emoji was used, this short name will lead to a misinterpretation.
So, against this backdrop there is a twofold problem in the use of emojis. The first problem pertains to understanding the emoji in the context in which it is used, as in the example above. The second problem pertains to being able to respond in a contextual situation, with an emoji and/or a message in a manner that is accurate and consonant with the contextual situation.